


i loved you, so i drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars

by MasterOfAllImagination



Category: Black Sails
Genre: (perhaps a bit egotistically), M/M, and then i wrote some fic, but i still think, so i binge watched both seasons in two days, sue me, that is is a worthwhile contribution to this small but mighty fandom, this one is not some of my best writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-20 18:08:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4797194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasterOfAllImagination/pseuds/MasterOfAllImagination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Charleston burns in the wake of his ship, Flint calls upon a memory of Thomas to dull the pain of his grief for Miranda.  Such memories, he is quickly reminded, are usually called "bittersweet" for a damn good reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i loved you, so i drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars

**Author's Note:**

> A note about the timeline: I imagine this taking place sometime between the departure from Charleston but before the conversation with Silver in the last episode. The italics (flashbacks) pick up immediately after that which we were most cruelly shown only a morsel of during 2x05.

Above him, the ropes creaked. The ropes never ceased creaking save for when the ship was becalmed; therefore, Flint liked the sound.  He shielded his brow and glanced up, flicking his eyes over the mainsail and up to the quarterdeck, briefly catching De Groot's eye and then purposefully breaking away. De Groot looked up from the wheel for a moment.  Flint dropped his hand and moved off.

A memory was forcing its way up into Flint's consciousness that he was endeavouring, like a sailor without his sea legs attempting to hold the contents of his stomach, to keep down.  He spread his fists, knuckles-down, on the balustrade, and pressed them hard into the wood.  It was not working.  The sweet components of the memory were too tempting, and they beckoned him from under their swaddle of bitterness, daring him-- in his grief-- to seek solace in them.  He pushed his heels into the deck through the soles of his boots.  Was it right that he should think of him-- and _only_ him-- when she was the one that he had just lost?  It was like looking past a recent wound to catch a glimpse of an old scar, long thought healed, only to find that it had sprung open overnight and was leaking mercilessly into the world.  The surprise that it could still hurt, after all this time, was more potent than the pain.  

He tilted his head back and drew deep lungfuls of the sea in through his nose, and then he held them there, and then he breathed out.  When he breathed in again, it was not the sea he smelled.

_The gentle lingering aroma of bath soap, faint and unobtrusive.  A more permeating musk-- the natural scent of a man-- wafting his way, spread only an instant ago by the close-passing of one Thomas Hamilton.  The man's lack of propriety apparently extended to a disregard of personal space._

\--and out. The memory faded, and so did the smell.  Each time he called upon it, it seemed to Flint to get a little bit fainter. A bit harder to recall.  Certain things became worn out too quickly when perused too long and too often: a favorite shirt, a gay tune, a favored walk, a bit of seemly prose--

_"'I have often wondered,"' Thomas began to read softly read aloud, "'how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. If then a god or a wise teacher sh_ _ould present himself to a man and bid him to think of nothing and to design nothing which he would not express as soon as he conceived it, he could not endure it even for a single day. So much more respect have we to what our neighbours shall think of us than to what we shall think of o_ _urselves.'"_

_James, his back to Thomas's reclining form, heard the book fold shut behind him._

_"What do you think?" Thomas asked._

_"Are you looking for an objective answer?"_

_"Why on Earth would your answer be anything but?"_

_"I don't think I could dislike or criticize anything read to me in the way you did just now."_

_There was a ripe pause. "In what way is that?"_

_James heard the sheets shift.  Goosebumps rose on his bare shoulderblades and the backs of his arms, as if in preparation for Thomas's touch.  He was not disappointed. There-- there it was, light as a feather over the curve of his shoulder bone, and then firmer, dipping beneath it to the muscles of his back, spreading and warm.  A chaste thing. An innocent and true and fervent desire to simply touch, and be close-- a feeling James had only ever recognized here, in this room; with this man._

_He mulled over Thomas's question like he might worry a piece of ill-ground spice jammed between two teeth.  So many responses clouded in front of his eyes, seeming to run over into the hands clasped loosely between his knees.  Some of them were lies. Some of them were true. Perhaps even too true. He picked one or the other up at random, turning them over, trying them out in his head, and discarding them one by one until most of the lies a _nd nearly all of the truths_  had been eliminated.  Finally, he picked the one he'd been avoiding. The well-loved and oft-worn bauble of a woman left amongst its less-used brethren in her jewel-box._

_"Lovingly," he replied._

_Thomas's hand never stilled, but his breathing stuttered for a moment, only discernible by James by the grace of the absolute morning quiet granted by their chambers._

_"All actions that I take towards you could be described in that way," he said.  And it followed the hitch in his breath so quickly, so without hesitation, that any trepidation that James had held in saying that word-- and emptying into the ethos all that it implied-- became so silly, that the more he thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed to have ever doubted saying it._

_James's mouth twisted up, and then his torso twisted around where he sat, folding his shoulder into the crook of Thomas's arm.  A fond smile greeted him.  He drank of it deeper than the finest port.  It's cloy clogged his mouth as though it were honey, and he thought-- 'Perhaps,' he thought, 'I should say nothing, and take this tacitly, and not press for the removal of ambiguity, and simply trust in Thomas to--'_

_But like he so often did, Thomas plucked the choice out of his hands.  "It's because I love you, you know,"  he half-teased.  Memories of long talks in Thomas's study rose in James's mind;_ hours _upon_ hours  _of talking, and the way Thomas would sometimes use that same tone of voice to rib him about some point of logic that James had overlooked._

_James's fingers threaded their way into Thomas's._

_"I love you so truly I scarcely know what to call it anymore.  It feels nothing like the love I have for Miranda; it feels..." He trailed off, and clenched his free fist, and grimaced slightly in a way that was more a smile, accompanying it with a mischievous twinkle in his eye that James was beginning to find more dangerously intoxicating by the day.  "It feels like you," he finished, unclenching his fist and laying his palm alongside James's shadowy jaw._

_James turned his head to lay a kiss into it.  Thomas stuttered again: this time not with his breath but with his eyes.  James was slowly but surely compiling a manifest in his mind of all the things that could make Thomas stutter.  One day he would go down the list, one by one, and tick off each of them, in the span of an hour, or perhaps two, or however long they had on that day, just to revel in the power that he had over this man-- this lord--_

\-- _and to remind himself how much of his own agency he had in his turn willingly ceded into Thomas's warm, paper hands._

"Captain?"

His eyes ripped open.  He retained his reflexive jump of surprise-- but only just.  De Groot was at his shoulder, chattering to him about changing wind speed or somesuch without seeming to require any concrete input from him.  For a moment, he blocked him out, and listened for the creaking in the rigging.  After a moment it came: like a rushing of water spilled into his eardrums.  

He nodded to De Groot and muttered something gutteral and assenting, which was all the man seemed to have wanted in the first place.  Long strides had already brought him halfway to his cabin before he thought better of it-- and of Silver, waiting for him in his sickbed-- and made for the bow, as far fore as he could go without getting onto the bowspirit, watching the sea sucking by underneath and behind him.  For the memory was only half finished, and the longer he kept it from unspooling the more tension it would torsion in his mind, until he was scarcely blinking but for the thought of it.  He knew.  He'd had seven years of trial and error and pain to figure out the best way to safely decant his sweet mental poisons.

_They were silent together for a while. Thomas held his eyes with his own as easily as he held his hand, and the morning did not seem to turn at all towards afternoon.  Finally, James looked away, and Thomas did not begrudge him for it, for it was this which gave him back the power he needed to speak._

_"I have never loved a man before," he began._

_"I know," Thomas interjected.  James mashed a single finger into Thomas's pressed and grinning lips to silence him, and felt his smile curve even further-- if possible-- around his fingertip._

_Just for the sheer glee of rankling Thomas, James began again.  "I have never loved a man before," he said lowly.  Then he paused, and shed the lightness in his voice.  He stopped at the lintel of a beautiful stone cottage by the sea and shucked his rain-soaked slick, and pulled from the peg instead a dry and comfortable housecoat.  "And since I have never loved a man before, I do not know if what I feel for you is truly love."  James hastened to continue before the imagined contraction of Thomas's brow could begin. "However."_

_And here, the illusion of melancholy was broken, and Thomas did the most beautiful thing that James had ever seen.  He smiled at him.  His love pushed itself out of every orifice and rearranged his lips into the purest reflection of that purest of emotions, and that expression--_

James leaned forward over the balustrade, forearms taut, knuckles white, everything he had and every faculty of his concentration devoted to the remembrance of that brand-bright scene unfurling with dream-like realness in his mind--

\-- _that expression was the thing that took the last laces out of James's housecoat, and let even that fall the the ground.  "_ _But if what I feel isn't love," he continued, "then I never want the misfortune of having to experience love, because I don't see how it could ever make me more happy than I am now."_

_"You speak as a man who knows his own heart," Thomas said softly.  "In fact, you speak as well as the emperor himself-- although I don't think I've ever read any passages of his that were quite so tenderly phrased."  After a moment, he_ _lay back down on the bed and pulled James alongside him, his arm wrapped under James's back, their ribs pressed together.  With his free hand, he retrieved Marcus Aurelius, and held it aloft in front of their heads so James could see._

_"Shall I continue?"_

Flint opened his eyes, and felt the intermittent sea spray on his face for the first time.  He let it hide the moisture lingering in his eyes, for Miranda's sake. After a moment he thumbed at his lids and boxed up the memories he had taken out for Thomas's sake very carefully.  Then he turned around and carried his grief with him back onto the deck amongst his crew; and this he did for Flint's sake, for he did not know how to be James without either of them.

**Author's Note:**

> The pretentious title is one of my favorite quotes from T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, who, coincidentally, is also rumored to have been gay. The quote at the beginning of the flashback is, of course, Marcus Aurelius.


End file.
